From the 1970s onward, Stuart Hall's pioneering work, along with
his colleagues Paul Willis, Dick Hebdige, Tony
Jefferson, and Angela McRobbie, created an
international intellectual movement. Many cultural studies scholars
employed Marxist methods of analysis, exploring the
relationships between cultural forms (the
superstructure) and that of the political economy (the
base). By the 1970s, however, the politically formidable
British working classes were in decline. Britain's manufacturing
industries were fading and union rolls were shrinking. Yet,
millions of working class Britons backed the rise of Margaret
Thatcher. For Stuart Hall and other Marxist theorists, this
shift in loyalty from the Labour Party to the Conservative Party was
antithetical to the interests of the working class and had to be
explained in terms of cultural politics.

In order to understand the changing political circumstances of
class, politics, and culture in the United Kingdom, scholars at the
CCCS turned to the work of Antonio Gramsci. Gramsci had been
concerned with similar issues: why would Italian laborers and
peasants vote for fascists? Why, in other words, would working
people vote to give more control to corporations, and see their own
rights and freedoms abrogated? Gramsci modified classical
Marxism in seeing culture as a key instrument of political and
social control. In this view, capitalists use not only brute force
(police, prisons, repression, military) to maintain control, but
also penetrate the everyday culture of working people. Thus, the
key rubric for Gramsci and for cultural studies is that of cultural
hegemony.

In the work of Hall,
Hebdige and McRobbie, popular culture came to the fore... What
Gramsci gave to this was the importance of consent and culture. If
the fundamental Marxists saw power in terms of class versus class,
then Gramsci gave to us a question of class alliance. The
rise of cultural studies itself was based on the decline of the
prominence of fundamental class-versus-class politics.[2]

”

Write Edgar and Sedgwick:

The theory of hegemony
was of central importance to the development of British cultural
studies [particularly the CCCS]. It facilitated analysis of the
ways in which subordinate groups actively resist and respond to
political and economic domination. The subordinate groups need not
be seen merely as the passive dupes of the dominant class and its
ideology.[3]

This line of thinking opened up fruitful work exploring agency; a theoretical outlook
which reinserted the active, critical capacities of all people.
Notions of agency have supplanted much scholarly emphasis on groups
of people (e.g. the working class, primitives, colonized peoples,
women) whose political consciousness and
scope of action was generally limited to their position within
certain economic and political structures. In other words, many
economists, sociologists, political scientists, and historians have
traditionally deprived everyday people of a role in shaping their
world or outlook, although anthropologists since the 1960s have
foregrounded the power of agents to contest structure, first in the
work of transactionalists like Fredrik Barth, and then in works inspired
by resistance theory and post-colonial theory.

At times, cultural studies' romance with agency nearly excluded
the possibility of oppression, overlooks the fact that the
subaltern have their own politics, and romanticizes agency,
overblowing its potentiality and pervasiveness. In work of this
kind, popular in the 1990s, many cultural studies scholars
discovered in consumers ways of creatively using and subverting
commodities and dominant ideologies. This orientation has come
under fire for a variety of reasons.

Cultural studies concerns itself with the meaning and practices of
everyday life. Cultural practices comprise the ways people do
particular things (such as watching television, or eating out) in a
given culture. In any given practice, people use various objects
(such as iPods or handguns). Hence, this
field studies the meanings and uses people attribute to various
objects and practices. Recently, as capitalism has spread throughout the world
(a process associated with globalization), cultural studies has
begun to analyse local and global forms of resistance to Western
hegemony.

Overview

In his book Introducing Cultural Studies, Ziauddin Sardar
lists the following five main characteristics of cultural
studies:

Cultural studies aims to examine its subject matter in terms of
cultural practices and their relation to power. For example, a study of a subculture (such as white
working class youth in London) would consider the social practices
of the youth as they relate to the dominant classes.

It has the objective of understanding culture in all its
complex forms and of analyzing the social and political context in
which culture manifests itself.

It is both the object of study and the location of political
criticism and action. For example, not only would a cultural
studies scholar study an object, but she/he would connect this
study to a larger, progressive political project.

It attempts to expose and reconcile the division of knowledge, to overcome the
split between tacit cultural knowledge and objective (universal)
forms of knowledge.

It has a commitment to an ethical evaluation of modern society and to a radical line of
political action.

Since cultural studies is an interdisciplinary field, its
practitioners draw a diverse array of theories and practices.

In contrast, "cultural studies was grounded in a pragmatic,
liberal-pluralist tradition" in the United States (Lindlof &
Taylor, 2002,p. 60).The American version of cultural studies
initially concerned itself more with understanding the subjective
and appropriative side of audience reactions to, and uses of, mass
culture; for example, American cultural-studies advocates wrote
about the liberatory aspects of fandom. The distinction between American and
British strands, however, has faded.

In Canada, cultural studies
has sometimes focused on issues of technology and society,
continuing the emphasis in the work of Marshall McLuhan and others. In Australia, there has
sometimes been a special emphasis on cultural policy. In South Africa, human rights and Third World issues are
among the topics treated. There were a number of exchanges between
Birmingham and Italy, resulting
in work on Italian leftism, and theories of postmodernism. On the other
hand, there is a debate in Latin America about the relevance of
cultural studies, with some researchers calling for more
action-oriented research. Cultural Studies
is relatively undeveloped in France, where there is a stronger tradition of
semiotics, as in the
writings of Roland
Barthes. Also in Germany
it is undeveloped, probably due to the continued influence of the
Frankfurt
School, which has developed a body of writing on such topics as
mass culture, modern art and music.

Some researchers, especially in early British cultural studies,
apply a Marxist model to the field. This strain of
thinking has some influence from the Frankfurt School, but especially from
the structuralist Marxism of Louis Althusser
and others. The main focus of an orthodox Marxist approach
concentrates on the production of meaning. This model
assumes a mass production of culture and identifies power as
residing with those producing cultural artifacts. In a Marxist
view, those who control the means of production (the economic
base) essentially control a culture.

Other approaches to cultural studies, such as feminist
cultural studies and later American developments of the field,
distance themselves from this view. They criticize the Marxist
assumption of a single, dominant meaning, shared by all, for any
cultural product. The non-Marxist approaches suggest that different
ways of consuming cultural artifacts affect the meaning of the
product. This view is best exemplified by the book Doing
Cultural Studies: The Case of the Sony Walkman (by Paul du Gay
et al.), which seeks to challenge the notion that those who produce
commodities control the meanings that people attribute to them.
Feminist cultural analyst, theorist and art historian Griselda
Pollock contributed to cultural studies from viewpoints of art history and psychoanalysis.
The writer Julia
Kristeva is was an influential voice in the turn of the
century, contributing to cultural studies from the field of art and
psychoanalytical French feminism.

Ultimately, this perspective criticizes the traditional view
assuming a passive consumer, particularly by underlining the
different ways people read, receive, and interpret
cultural texts. On this view, a consumer can appropriate, actively
reject, or challenge the meaning of a product. These different
approaches have shifted the focus away from the production
of items. Instead, they argue that consumption plays an
equally important role, since the way consumers consume a product
gives meaning to an item. Some closely link the act of consuming
with cultural identity. Stuart Hall and John Fiske have become
influential in these developments.

Critical
views

Cultural studies is not a unified theory but a diverse field of
study encompassing many different approaches, methods, and academic
perspectives; as in any academic discipline, cultural studies
academics frequently debate among themselves. However, some
academics from other fields have criticised the discipline as a
whole. It has been popular to dismiss cultural studies as an
academic fad. Yale literature professor Harold Bloom has been an outspoken critic
of the cultural studies model of literary studies. Critics such as
Bloom see cultural studies as it applies to literary scholarship as
a vehicle of careerism by academics, instead promoting essentialist
theories of culture, mobilising arguments that scholars should
promote the public interest by studying what makes beautiful
literary works beautiful.

Bloom stated his position during the 3 September 2000 episode of
C-SPAN's Booknotes:

“

[T]here are two enemies
of reading now in the world, not just in the English-speaking
world. One [is] the lunatic destruction of literary studies...and
its replacement by what is called cultural studies in all of the
universities and colleges in the English-speaking world, and
everyone knows what that phenomenon is. I mean, the...now-weary
phrase 'political correctness' remains a perfectly good descriptive
phrase for what has gone on and is, alas, still going on almost
everywhere and which dominates, I would say, rather more than
three-fifths of the tenured faculties in the English-speaking
world, who really do represent a treason of the intellectuals, I
think, a 'betrayal of the clerks'."[5]

”

Literary critic Terry Eagleton is not wholly opposed to
cultural studies theory like Bloom, but has criticised certain
aspects of it, highlighting what he sees as its strengths and
weaknesses in books such as After Theory (2003). For
Eagleton, literary and cultural theory
have the potential to say important things about the "fundamental
questions" in life, but theorists have rarely realized this
potential.

One of the most prominent critiques of cultural studies came
from physicist Alan
Sokal, who submitted an article to a cultural-studies
journal, Social
Text. This article was what Sokal thought would be a
parody of what he perceived to be the "fashionable nonsense" of postmodernists working in cultural studies.
As the paper was coming out, Sokal published an article in a
self-described "academic gossip" magazine Lingua Franca, revealing
the hoax. His explanation for doing this was:

“

Politically, I'm angered
because most (though not all) of this silliness is emanating from
the self-proclaimed Left. We're witnessing here a profound
historical volte-face. For most of the past two centuries,
the Left has been identified with science and against obscurantism;
we have believed that rational thought and the fearless analysis of
objective reality (both natural and social) are incisive tools for
combating the mystifications promoted by the powerful -- not to
mention being desirable human ends in their own right. The recent
turn of many "progressive" or "leftist" academic humanists and
social scientists toward one or another form of epistemic
relativism betrays this worthy heritage and undermines the already
fragile prospects for progressive social critique. Theorizing about
"the social construction of reality" won't help us find an
effective treatment for AIDS or devise strategies for preventing
global warming. Nor can we combat false ideas in history,
sociology, economics and politics if we reject the notions of truth
and falsity.[6]

”

Another criticism comes from the sociology of Pierre
Bourdieu, who has also written on topics such as photography,
art museums, and modern literature. Bourdieu's point is that
cultural studies lacks scientific method. His own work makes
innovative use of statistics and in-depth interviews. Cultural
studies is relatively unstructured as an academic field. It is
difficult to hold researchers accountable for their claims because
there is no agreement on method and validity.

Cultural Studies in the
21st Century

Though a young discipline, cultural studies has established a
firm footing in many universities around the globe. With steadily
rising enrollments, expanding numbers of departments, and a robust
publishing field, cultural studies steps into the 21st century as a
young yet successful discipline. The discipline is filled with
discussions about its future directions, methods, and purposes.

Sociologist Scott
Lash has recently put forth the idea that cultural studies is
entering a new phase. Arguing that the political and economic
milieu has fundamentally altered from that of the 1970s, he writes,
"I want to suggest that power now... is largely
post-hegemonic... Hegemony was the concept that de facto
crystallized cultural studies as a discipline. Hegemony means
domination through consent as much as coercion. It has meant
domination through ideology or discourse..." [7] He
writes that the flow of power is becoming more internalized, that
there has been "a shift in power from the hegemonic mode of
'power over' to an intensive notion of power from
within (including domination from within) and power as a
generative force."[8]
Resistance to power, in other words, becomes complicated when power
and domination are increasingly (re)produced within oneself, within
subaltern groups, within exploited people.

In response, however, Richard Johnson argues that Lash
appears to have misunderstood the most basic concept of the
discipline.[9] 'Hegemony', even in the
writings of Antonio Gramsci, is not understood as a
mode of domination at all, but as a form of political leadership
which involves a complex set of relationships between various
groups and individuals and which always proceeds from the immanence
of power to all social relations. This complex understanding has
been taken much further in the work of Stuart Hall and that of
political theorist Ernesto Laclau, who has had some
influence on Cultural Studies. It is therefore unclear as to why
Lash claims that Cultural Studies has understood hegemony as a form
of domination, or where the originality of his theory of power is
actually thought to lie.

This illustrates the extent to which Cultural Studies remains a
highly contested field of intellectual debate and
self-revision.

Institutionally, the discipline has undergone major shifts. The
Department of Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham,
which was descended from the Centre for
Contemporary Cultural Studies, closed in 2002, although by this
time the intellectual centre of gravity of the discipline had long
since shifted to other universities throughout the world. Strong
cultural studies programs can be found in the United Kingdom, North
and South America, Europe, Australia, and Asia, and there are a
host of journals and conferences where cultural studies research is
published and presented.

Founding
Works

Hall identifies some originating texts, or the original
'curriculum', of the field of cultural studies:

Notes

^
In a loosely related but separate usage, the phrase
cultural studies sometimes serves as a rough synonym for area
studies, as a general term referring to the academic
study of particular cultures in departments and programs such as Islamic
studies, Asian
studies, African American studies,
et al.. However, strictly speaking, cultural studies
programs are not concerned with specific areas of the world so much
as specific cultural practices.